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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of October, 2017.

Text Editor: Data StructuresOctober 01, 2017(comments)
An internet stumbles around the world of data structures. Hackernews takes turns describing the uniformly bad decisions they made when implementing their respective toy editors. Some time is spent arguing whether text files continue to be text files once they are more than a couple megabytes. No resolution is reached. An Atom developer shows up to give us some tips on reducing memory usage. Tips on memory usage from an Atom developer. An Atom developer decides to educate others on reducing memory usage. An Atom develo

Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gatewayOctober 02, 2017(comments)
Apache is making a remote desktop program. They call it 'clientless' because it does not require a client, except for a massive document processing platform with a turing-complete embedded scripting language whose development requires tens of thousands of hours of labor per year and the operation of which uses hundreds of megabytes of ram just to show an empty screen. Hackernews remarks how easy this task is, except for the parts that aren't. The comment thread uses the term "HTML 5" nine times to mean javascript, but does not mention javascript at all. Half the comments are arguing about whether the name is stupid.

How the Elderly Lose Their RightsOctober 03, 2017(comments)
A newspaper points out that the government can just declare your ass useless and take you and all your shit. Hackernews debates whether the solution is to preëmptively give yourself and all your shit to your children, but is concerned because they raised their children to be the sort of assholes who would sell them up the river for a chai latte. A lot of the comments are trying to ascertain whether old people are even worth saving, or whether old people are huge assholes who won't be missed. A lot more are trying to decide exactly when a given Hackernews is allowed to murder government officials.

Keybase launches encrypted GitOctober 04, 2017(comments)
Some internets launch Github For Cryptonerds, then show up in the comments section to pretend it matters. Hackernews is falling over itself to send money, but nobody will take it. Perhaps the Keybase developers have a conscience.

PostgreSQL 10 ReleasedOctober 05, 2017(comments)
Some database nerds crank out another version of their software. Hackernews is angry that the massive general-purpose SQL engine doesn't flawlessly optimize every single query on the fly. The discussion rapidly spirals into implementation details of software that is primarily used to host spam comments on Wordpress blogs.

Security.txtOctober 06, 2017(comments)
Some webshits clone robots.txt, again, for no particularly useful reason. It took ten webshits to draft a specification for a four-line text file. Hackernews spends several hours trying to decide what "disclosure" means, and which flavors are represented by modifers like "full," "coordinated," and "responsible." Even Hackernews suspects that a security-related text file with no provisions for authenticating the contents might not be the best plan.

Five minute guide to better typographyOctober 07, 2017(comments)
A webshit posts a typography guide which contains about three words per page and recommends linewrapping suitable for an ASR-33. Hackernews declares typography a mathematical science but immediately gets distracted by bright colors. The rest of the comments are Hackernews airing out their pet peeves and whining about which fonts people choose.